Proust: The Search

by Benjamin Taylor

Overview

“Taylor’s endeavor is not to explain the life by the novel or the novel by the life but to show how different events, different emotional upheavals, fired Proust’s imagination and, albeit sometimes completely transformed, appeared in his work. The result is a very subtle, thought-provoking book.”—Anka Muhlstein, author of Balzac’s Omelette and Monsieur Proust’s Library
 
Marcel Proust came into his own as a novelist comparatively late in life, yet only Shakespeare, Balzac, Dickens, Tolstoy, and Dostoyevsky were his equals when it came to creating characters as memorably human. As biographer Benjamin Taylor suggests, Proust was a literary lightweight before writing his multivolume masterwork In Search of Lost Time, but following a series of momentous historical and personal events, he became—against all expectations—one of the greatest writers of his, and indeed any, era.
 
This insightful, beautifully written biography examines Proust’s artistic struggles—the “search” of the subtitle—and stunning metamorphosis in the context of his times. Taylor provides an in-depth study of the author’s life while exploring how Proust’s personal correspondence and published works were greatly informed by his mother’s Judaism, his homosexuality, and such dramatic events as the Dreyfus Affair and, above all, World War I. As Taylor writes in his prologue, “Proust’s Search is the most encyclopedic of novels, encompassing the essentials of human nature. . . . His account, running from the early years of the Third Republic to the aftermath of World War I, becomes the inclusive story of all lives, a colossal mimesis. To read the entire Search is to find oneself transfigured and victorious at journey’s end, at home in time and in eternity too.”

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780300165968
Publisher:	Yale University Press
Publication date:	10/27/2015
Series:	Jewish Lives
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	224
File size:	4 MB

About the Author

Benjamin Taylor is a founding member of the Graduate Writing Program faculty at the New School and the author or editor of six previous books, including The Book of Getting Even and Saul Bellow: Letters.

Editorial Reviews

08/17/2015
This brief but thorough biography of Marcel Proust (1871–1922) from esteemed author and editor Taylor (Naples Declared) isn’t intended to be the definitive biography of the French novelist who wrote In Search of Lost Time. Instead, Taylor touches on the influences of Proust’s Jewish heritage, homosexuality, and debilitating asthma, as well as the pivotal event of the Dreyfus Affair, on his art and life. Among Taylor’s conclusions are that Proust did not see himself as a Jew but rather as “the non-Jewish son of a Jewish mother,” and that he protested the conviction of Alfred Dreyfus on espionage charges because he believed the French-Jewish artillery officer was innocent, rather than out of ethnic solidarity. Starting in childhood and proceeding briskly through the major events of Proust’s life, Taylor quotes liberally and wisely from Proust’s massive correspondence, early writings, essays, and interviews. In the process, he traces the complexities of Proust’s personality and painstaking artistic development from mere talent to genius, only achieved “after long years of application to his native language, and nine of servitude to Ruskin’s.” Taylor writes that “time, the only divinity Proust acknowledged, which makes dust of us, also makes us giants,” evocatively capturing the lasting importance of Proust’s masterpiece and its theme. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly

"This engaging book, invitingly elegant to handle with it’s beautiful deckle-edged pages, should encourage those who have quailed at the thought of Proust’s colossus to have another go."—John Carey, Sunday Times

"Benjamin Taylor’s Proust: The Search is a marvel of brief biography, reanimating the hapless, almost Chaplinesque figure who by all logic should never have accomplished what he did. With a kind of worldly tenderness, Taylor shows Proust’s work accruing amid personal pratfalls, French anti-Semitism and the catastrophe of World War I."—Thomas Mallon, New York Times Book Review

"Taylor’s loose, multi-clausal sentences are as bendy as the master’s, and there is the same shimmery quality to the prose, like sunlight glancing off a shallow Normandy sea."—Kathryn Hughes, Guardian

"An important contribution to the study of this complex individual . . . A riveting summary of the rampant anti-Semitism found in late 19th-century France . . . . Excellent analysis of the Dreyfus affair and how it split French society . . . . A noteworthy biography of a great writer."—Library Journal

"A sensitive study of literature's favorite neurasthenic. . . . Readers of Proust will be fascinated to find clues as to who his characters were in real life, and they should be moved to appreciation by Taylor's assessment of Proust's accomplishment . . . A densely packed and rewarding book."—Kirkus Reviews

"Taylor expertly deconstructs where the similarities between Proust's fictional self and real-life self begin and end . . . . A deep analysis of Proust's masterpiece and a biography of Proust the man, Taylor proves, are one and the same."—Shelf Awareness

"Those who found reading Proust too grand an undertaking over the years because of distractions and deficiencies of their own, might well rush to reconsider after confronting this dazzlingly elegant biography."—Philip Roth

"Taylor’s endeavor is not to explain the life by the novel or the novel by the life but to show how different events, different emotional upheavals, fired Proust’s imagination and, albeit sometimes completely transformed, appeared in his work. The result is a very subtle, thought-provoking book."—Anka Muhlstein, author of Balzac’s Omelette and Monsieur Proust’s Library

From the Publisher

“Those who found reading Proust too grand an undertaking over the years because of distractions and deficiencies of their own, might well rush to reconsider after confronting this dazzlingly elegant biography.”—Philip Roth

Philip Roth

“Taylor’s endeavor is not to explain the life by the novel or the novel by the life but to show how different events, different emotional upheavals, fired Proust’s imagination and, albeit sometimes completely transformed, appeared in his work. The result is a very subtle, thought-provoking book.”—Anka Muhlstein, author of Balzac’s Omelette and Monsieur Proust’s Library

Anka Muhlstein

“Taylor expertly deconstructs where the similarities between Proust's fictional self and real-life self begin and end . . . . A deep analysis of Proust's masterpiece and a biography of Proust the man, Taylor proves, are one and the same.”—Shelf Awareness

Shelf Awareness

“Deeply researched, and immensely well considered, Benjamin Taylor’s own search is an outstanding addition to Proust studies.”—Robert McCrum, The Observer

The Observer - Robert McCrum

“This engaging book, invitingly elegant to handle with it’s beautiful deckle-edged pages, should encourage those who have quailed at the thought of Proust’s colossus to have another go.”—John Carey, Sunday Times

Sunday Times - John Carey

"Benjamin Taylor’s Proust: The Search is a marvel of brief biography, reanimating the hapless, almost Chaplinesque figure who by all logic should never have accomplished what he did. With a kind of worldly tenderness, Taylor shows Proust’s work accruing amid personal pratfalls, French anti-Semitism and the catastrophe of World War I."—Thomas Mallon, New York Times Book Review

New York Times Book Review - Thomas Mallon

“Because Taylor has been willing to learn from Proust how to write his biography — be enjoyably clever but not too presumptuous — his book is unusually instructive about how we can read Proust…  Explains both formally and intimately, through straightforward documentary narrative and engaging interpretation, the facts and fictions of Proust’s extraordinarily improbable life. —Adam Phillips, London Review of Books

London Review of Books - Adam Phillips

“Taylor’s loose, multi-clausal sentences are as bendy as the master’s, and there is the same shimmery quality to the prose, like sunlight glancing off a shallow Normandy sea.”—Kathryn Hughes, Guardian

Guardian - Kathryn Hughes

10/15/2015
Marcel Proust (1871–1922), arguably one of the greatest French novelists of the 20th century, is best known for his epic In Search of Lost Time. Although numerous Proust biographies exist, Taylor (Naples Declared; The Book of Getting Even) makes an important contribution to the study of this complex individual. With this concise account, the author captures a "lost time," the "Belle époque" days of pre-World War I France, especially the Parisian society Proust frequented. This title highlights the writer's many loves, the deaths of his parents, and the publications of his works. It also provides a riveting summary of the rampant anti-Semitism found in late 19th-century France. Taylor offers excellent analysis of the Dreyfus affair and how it split French society. Although raised Catholic, Proust's mother was Jewish, and Taylor evocatively relates Proust's interactions with those who discriminated against Jewish people. VERDICT A noteworthy biography of a great writer. This title will attract readers interested in French literature, civilization, and history.—Erica Swenson Danowitz, Delaware Cty. Community Coll. Lib., Media, PA

Library Journal

2015-07-30
A sensitive study of literature's favorite neurasthenic. The French Jewish novelist Marcel Proust (1871-1922), writes Taylor (Graduate Writing Program/New School; Naples Declared: A Walk Around the Bay, 2012, etc.), was sickly and of course really sick, physically and emotionally. Yet even before he locked himself into a cork-lined room and bid high society adieu, he labored endlessly, putting sickness to good use. At 15, for instance, he read endlessly. "Much of the literature that would be most important to Proust was internalized during this period of insatiable reading," writes Taylor, a reading list that included huge and ambitious novels by Tolstoy, Balzac, Dostoyevsky, and George Eliot. Against the backdrop of essentially private activity, Taylor does good work in locating Proust among more or less privileged contemporaries, gay and straight and indifferent, and against a time that saw the emergence of a nationally tolerated anti-Semitism in events that Proust followed carefully and incorporated into his books. But for all the strength of his cultural historicizing, the author is best as a reader of Proust alone—and an observer of Proust at work writing À la recherche du temps perdu, complaining bitterly to his publisher about the agonies of editing ("The struggle to read four thousand pages of proofs," Taylor sagely notes, "was exhausting and enraging"), and howling, "I cannot cut the book as easily as a lump of butter." Readers of Proust will be fascinated to find clues as to who his characters were in real life, and they should be moved to appreciation by Taylor's assessment of Proust's accomplishment, capturing nothing less than time itself, that thing that, if it turns us into dust, "also makes us giants." And not only that, but capturing time in "a moral accounting as comprehensive as Dante's…." Though brief, a densely packed and rewarding book.

Kirkus Reviews